Optimizing your Pressure Equipment Inspection strategy

Pressure Equipment Inspections take up valuable time, can cause incidents, and often require downtime. That’s why most organizations could save thousands to millions of dollars a year, just by optimizing their pressure equipment inspection strategy. How do you do that? You collect and analyze your data, to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of your inspection process.

Let’s further explore why you should be optimizing your inspection process using data. There are some very compelling reasons: 

By optimizing your inspection strategy you’ll be able to expand your inspection interval and minimize the number of inspections. That means a significant reduction in downtime, which saves you lots of time and money.

In just one year we found ways to save 100 million dollars for a global oil and gas company, only by optimizing their inspection strategy.

In the past years, there have been some bad incidents during intrusive inspections, since they often require confined space entries and exposure to toxins. Data can help you limit the needed number of intrusive inspections and improve safety.

You need to comply with (sometimes very strict) local safety regulations. To show compliance you may need to open up vessels and pipelines, which can be a lot of work. You can use data to more efficiently show compliance to authorities. How? Let’s say you wanted to demonstrate the integrity of your facility. This would become much easier if you could prove all conditions were within limits (the PH for example).

Unfortunately, a lot of companies struggle when it comes to using data for optimizing their Pressure Equipment Inspection strategy.
You might recognize these common problems:

So how can you tackle these problems?

The first step in optimizing your strategy is implementing Risk-Based Inspection. This means you use data to predict the risk of corrosion and degradation for each area of your equipment. You then use this to create an effective inspection program, in which you focus your attention on the most critical areas.

The next step is the Minimum Intervention Strategy for Inspection (MISI). You can reach up to a 50% cost reduction for your turnarounds, by limiting the number of intrusive inspections. Smart technology, such as robots, sensors, and drones can help you achieve this.

A lot of organizations ask us about the use of machine learning and AI, but most organizations aren’t ready. Do you have your risk-based inspection strategy in place? Then it could be the right moment to look into these more advanced tools.

Do you want to start optimizing your Pressure Equipment Inspection strategy? A lot of organizations want to go too fast, which usually causes them to fail. It’s important to take this step by step and to first build a solid foundation.

First of all, it’s important to understand your problems and pain points. These should always be the starting point. Maybe you want to increase the interval between inspections? Or maybe you have too many leaks? That is what you’ll try to solve by collecting and analyzing data.

Once you know the problems you want to solve, you can decide which data you need to collect and start collecting them. There are lots of potential data sources.

Some examples of data sources:

Important things to keep in mind:

Now it’s time to crunch the data you’ve collected. Analyze the available data and look for possible correlations. Tools like IMS PEI can help you do this.

IMS PEI helps you manage equipment integrity, by defining when and what to inspect or repair using Shell’s RBI methodology and advanced corrosion calculations while keeping an audit trail. When an inspection is completed, the data will be used to automatically update your calculations and define the Next Inspection Date (NID).